The Problem
When an ICP project individually approaches a large Web3 publisher like Cointelegraph with a $10k marketing/PR budget, it’s hard for them to negotiate a good deal.
The “list price” for 1 sponsored article with a big publisher like this starts at $10k, and they might be willing to offer a small discount if they like the story/brand, but without a larger budget it’s hard to negotiate significant discounts.
Why this matters
Let’s take Cointelegraph as an example. They hold 42% of the global market share for Web3 media and get 8 million unique readers per month. Hundreds of thousands of relevant readers get push notifications on their phones when Cointelegraph publishes an article!
These publishers have exactly the type of external Web3-interested audience that ICP projects need to reach, but they’re used to working with big-budget EVM projects that can throw $100k into a single campaign, and most of them are still sleeping on ICP.
The Solution
We’ve got a decent PR budget for the next ICPCC, and we’re going to pool the PR budgets of other notable ICP brands into a larger overall PR budget. We will then approach a major web3 publisher (starting with Cointelegraph) with this large PR budget to negotiate a package deal that gives each brand their own sponsored articles (and perhaps tweets, newsletter spotlights, etc) at a bulk discount to what we would be able to get if we each approached the publisher on our own.
Basically, combined we’ll have a large enough budget to be taken seriously and negotiate a bulk purchase of sponsored content.
Who do we have so far?
ICPCC is coordinating the PR collaborative and we already have soft commits from 3 notable ICP brands (all three are SNS projects you’ve heard about). This puts the PR collab budget at ~$50k, but we’d like to bring on a few more ICP brands.
What is the ask?
To be included, each ICP project needs to make minimum of a $10k “soft commit”. This means you have that much PR/marketing budget available to spend, and you are serious about shopping offers for it, but you aren’t committing to any specific offer (since the exact sponsored content package still needs to be negotiated).
We’ll take the total of all these “soft commits”, and negotiate a package deal to maximize it as much as possible, and then you’d need to make the final decision to commit the funds as long as what you’ll get out of final deal looks good to you.
What do you get in return?
- Strong exposure with a major publisher at a significantly better price than what you’d be able to buy on your own.
- Some nice ICPCC perks we’re happy to throw in (>$1k value, we’ll share all the info).
Timeline
We have our first call with a major publisher scheduled for late next week (we established a good relationship with them last year). Interested ICP projects will need to add their soft commit to the pool within roughly the next week or so to be included.
Our target is for the PR campaign publications we negotiate to start going live as soon as late February, and then continue for several weeks after that. Keep this in mind, it’ll be an ideal fit if you have big items in your roadmap which will be ready to announce within the next 1-3 months.
Next Step
Send me a DM on X ASAP if you’d like for your brand to be included in this PR collaborative.
Serious inquiries from founders only. Each brand must pay their own way, so only reach out if you actually have the funds to soft commit a minimum of $10k to the PR pool. All ICP brands welcome!
Let’s make some noise for our ecosystem!!